alt Hacker NewsWhy is JS, in particular, so deeply afflicted with these issues? Why hasn’t there been an effort to create a more robust standard library? Or at least first party libraries maintained by the JavaScript team? That way folks can pull in trusted deps instead of all the hodgepodge.
Go did a lot wrong. It was just awful before they added Go modules. But it’s puzzling to me to understand why as a community and ecosystem its 3rd party dependencies seem so much less bloated. Part of it I think is because the standard library is pretty expansive. Part of it is because of things like golang.org/x. But there’s also a lot of corporate maintainers - and I feel like part of that is because packages are namespaces to the repository - which itself is namespaced to ownership. Technically that isn’t even a requirement - but the community adopted it pretty evenly - and it makes me wonder why others haven’t.
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Javascript is a standard with many implementations. Any addition to the "standard library" (such as it is) has to go through a long process to get approved by a committee, then in turn implemented by at least the major implementations (v8, SpiderMonkey, JavascriptKit).
> Or at least first party libraries maintained by the JavaScript team?
There is no "JavaScript team".
There has been an effort to both replace npm with a better model and to have a stable standard library. See https://jsr.io/@std
Mainly I think because of the scale it's used at, the things it's used for, and the people who use it.
Technicalities are secondary to those factors.
If Ruby was the only language that ran in the browser, you'd be writing the same rant about Ruby, no matter the stdlib.